The Economist predicts that in 15 years time there will be quantum computers: “But quantum computing does now seem to be acquiring a momentum of its own. Give it 15 years, and who knows what will result.” Okay, not quite, but there is an article about building quantum computers which can be found here
O brave new quantum world!
I hope they’re here in 10, else I have to buy a certain someone a trip to Rio…
The reason I’m optimistic is that I think we need only very small quantum computers to get to the point where we can simulate the physics of potentially larger quantum computers. So yes, nothing we look at today looks arbitrarily scalable – but it doesn’t need to be, it just needs to be able to help us design the next generation of quantum computers…
I guess that’s long enough for me to learn how to program one 🙂
I figure I might as well switch careers before all the good jobs get outsourced to India.
I’m optimistic: I believe we will have a working prototype by 2015.
When you say a working prototype, how many qubits do you mean? Clearly we already have quantum computers with a few qubits, so I can only guess you one that is beyond our ability to simulate. 40 qubits maybe? Or do you mean a design that is scalable and keeps under the error correction threshold?
I’m never quite sure how to take it when people ask when there will be quantum computers.